Editor’s note: The below interview contains spoilers for Chapter 6 of The Book of Boba Fett.Chapter 6 ofThe Book of Boba Fett, “From the Desert Comes a Stranger” was an absolute parade of cameos featuring familiar faces from across almost every era ofStar Warsstorytelling. While many are wondering just what Ahsoka Tano (Rosario Dawson) might be doing here, or catching up on who exactlyCad Bane(Corey Burton) is, the biggest remaining question is: how exactly are we experiencing a 30-year-oldLuke Skywalker, whenMark Hamillis 70 years old? Thanks to a feature fromEsquire, some of that mystery has been uncovered.
This isn’t even a new question, as many were asking themselves the same question following the season 2 finale ofThe Mandalorian, where the digitally de-aged Luke Skywalker made his first appearance. Though the technology has certainly improved since then, it doesn’t appear that the actual method has changed at all. When asked how Industrial Light & Magic managed to make the iconic Jedi look 40 years younger, ILM SupervisorRichard Bluffsaid they made use of a program called Lola, explaining:
“They effectively reproduced a de-aged version of Mark for the shots by combining the texture from his face and also [the body double’s] younger face. The biggest challenge for this sequence was that we weren’t de-aging Mark in every single shot, and we had a variety of performances that Lola had to work on, too.”
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While the look of Luke Skywalker is a composite of two existing men, it’s the creation of his voice that is especially chilling. In the behind the scenes documentary,Disney Gallery: Star Wars:The Mandalorian, executive producer andBook of Boba FettscribeJon Favreausaid of the process: “Something people didn’t realize is that his voice isn’t real. His voice, the young Luke Skywalker voice, is completely synthesized using an application called Respeecher.” Which is to say, the voice that audiences hear on screen is not made up of lines actually being spoken by anyone at the time of production.
Sound editorMatthew Wood— who has also appeared onscreen inThe Mandalorianas Bib Fortuna — elaborated on just how they created an eerie digital replica of Hamill’s younger voice:
“It’s a neural network you feed information into and it learns. So I had archival material from Mark in that era. We had clean recorded ADR from the original films, a book on tape he’d done from those eras, and then also Star Wars radio plays he had done back in that time. I was able to get clean recordings of that, feed it into the system, and they were able to slice it up and feed their neural network to learn this data.”
At the end of the day, it begs the question of whether the great digital lengths gone through to simulate a young-Mark-Hamill-as-Luke performance was worth it. It might look and sound like him, but without the visual and vocal nuance only a real actor can provide, the whole thing comes out looking and sounding unnatural and stilted. If the plan is to keep bringing Luke Skywalker around, it’s worth wondering if perhaps they wouldn’t be better off simply recasting the role.
The Book of Boba Fettseason finale airs on Wednesdays, February 9th on Disney+.
